In my haste to start covering year-end Soundscan stuff, I didn’t realize that there were actually 53 weeks in this chart year!! So we’ll take a look at some of those year end numbers NEXT week. This, of course, also means that Susan Boyle still has a chance to overtake Taylor Swift for the honor of having the year’s best selling album, although I would say that chance is rather slim, considering both the fact that sales are going to drop sharply in the coming week as well as the fact that the kids who will be cashing in gift cards and exchanging their uncool Christmas gifts will be more apt to pick up Taylor Swift and RETURN copies of the Susan Boyle album.
Anyhoo, while we’re waiting for the year-end charts to be tabulated, let’s take a look at Billboard’s list of the Top 50 Music Moments of the past decade. This list is a pretty accurate compilation of the past ten years’ most earthshaking popular music moments. From ‘Nsync and Eminem’s massive sales at the decade’s outset to the popularity of the iPod, the device that changed the way we listen to music forever, a lot has happened, good and bad, in music.
That said, some of the moments listed here made me raise my eyebrow. Was the Spice Girls’ reunion tour important to ANYONE? Did Noreaga’s “Oye Mi Canto” really kick off the reggaeton movement (and which was a bigger flash in the pan, reggaeton or Texas rap?)? Couldn’t they have used a more sensitive headline to describe Elliott Smith’s death? If Kanye West was unknown outside of hip-hop circles when he had his little Hurricane Katrina telethon outburst, then who were the three million people who bought “The College Dropout” BEFORE that incident? Who edited and proofed this thing? It’s one thing to see numerous spelling and grammatical errors in a blog like this (which is normally composed on the fly and has an audience of 30), but when Billboard magazine is making more spelling errors than me (and I assume they pay someone to ensure that those errors don’t happen), we definitely have a problem.
